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I was trying to upgrade my Ubuntu installation to 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal), and the update manager (Muon) kept failing with error messages like:

dpkg: warning: 'ldconfig' not found in PATH or not executable.
dpkg: warning: 'start-stop-daemon' not found in PATH or not executable.
dpkg: error: 2 expected programs not found in PATH or not executable.
Note: root's PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin and /sbin.

which ldconfig as root returned /sbin/ldconfig, and of course, root‘s $PATH had /sbin in it, so, couldn’t think of a reason why the updates were failing. But a bit a googling led me to the sudoers file (/etc/sudoers)

Muon, and in turn apt-get, use sudo for installing stuff. And sudo starts with an empty/default ENV, if it’s either been compiled with –with-secure-path, or if env_reset has been set in the sudoers file. In my case, env_reset was set in the sudoers file, so, sudo‘s ENV didn’t have /sbin in it. In case of env_reset, you should provide a secure_path, which’s the $PATH that any sudoed process would use. So, after the fix, my /etc/sudoers looks like:

In case you’re seeing the error, but don’t have env_reset set in your sudoers file, then it’s likely that your version of sudo was compiled with -with-secure-path. To see the options that your version of sudo was compiled with: